For CMOs, marketing teams and go-to-market (GTM) professionals, the remit of your jobs just seems to get bigger and wider with each passing month.
AI has undoubtedly collapsed workflows to create clear productivity gains, but in tandem with this, it has created an expectation that you should be able to do infinitely more across every channel and become a domain expert in every touchpoint that affects your brand. This has resulted in an ever-expanding list of responsibilities, with your commercial accountability stretched far beyond, and sometimes uncomfortably beyond, where it once was.
The reality is that you can’t be expected to be an expert in everything, or, even with AI, manage each and every B2B brand channel (who remembers Clubhouse?).
This is where The Wise Up Wire Newsletter aims to help you.
We won’t analyze the entire marketing stack. Instead, our team will provide PR agency-level insight to marketers and GTM professionals who want to know more about media relations as a channel for creating brand awareness and reputation (without assuming you are a practitioner yourself).
Much like your own roles have fundamentally changed in such a short period of time, so has media:
- Leaner newsrooms: Sustained layoffs have drastically altered the editorial capabilities of many publishers, with newsrooms much leaner now, leaving journalists stretched, typically covering multiple beats.
- The impact of AI discovery on the economics of news: Some of this churn has been caused by how all media organizations are trying to adapt to the new world of AI discovery, via ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and others. Zero-click search, whereby queries are answered directly by the AI tool, has hastened a sharp decline in website traffic, badly impacting those publishers who relied heavily on referral traffic and digital advertising revenue from search engines like Google.
- Profitable media business models are still an issue: Monetization is an ongoing issue for many publications, with some having highly successful and profitable models (The New York Times, The Economist and The Financial Times), while many others are still trying to find a model that puts them onto a sound financial footing.
- Influence and audience no longer just sits with legacy media brands: Conversely, “new media” has arrived in the form of B2B content creators, Substack writers and YouTube-native podcast shows that mimic traditional broadcast media (TBPN and etn). We’ve seen high-profile journalists leave legacy brands to set up their own publications (Casey Newton, Alex Konrad, etc.).
For marketers and GTM professionals, it is no longer about having a media list of targets to distribute a press release to. Instead, it is understanding how this changing landscape affects your brand, where your audience is consuming information, as well as, crucially, what opportunities are emerging.
Considered insights, not hot takes- that’s the approach of the Wise Up Wire Newsletter.
What will each edition of the newsletter cover?
- The Big Theme: We’ll focus on one big issue within the world of earned media, per month, and dig into it in more detail.
- Media trendlines: A roundup of some of the changes and developments happening across the media industry.
- Statistic of the month: We will highlight one statistic that stops us in our tracks each month and explain why it’s worth paying attention to.
- Ask a Journalist: You get to ask a real journalist your burning questions that you need answered. Yes, it is a real journalist who will be answering these questions. Feel free to get deep in the weeds, or very topline.
- From Wise Up PR: A selection of our agency’s Insights and updates.
Who is the Wise Up Wire Newsletter for?
For CMOs, marketing teams and GTM professionals who have media relations somewhere within their current job remit, or soon will have, but who aren’t necessarily PR practitioners themselves. It’s for an audience that understands the role that earned media can have for a B2B brand, beyond reliance on purely paid-for channels.
Why we’re launching this newsletter
I’ve spent well over a decade working in media relations, running hundreds of campaigns and dealing directly with thousands of journalists globally, yet the same questions and challenges continue to come up from brands.
The Wise Up Wire gives us a place to answer such questions, share our team’s perspective and expertise and help you navigate through some of the challenges you are facing, or likely to face, when it comes to media relations. You’ll hear not just from me, but from our wider team of deeply experienced media relations specialists as well.
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